Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Future Proof Your Customer Experience

Nearly all organizations want a "Customer for Life" unless a particular customer is just plain toxic and difficult to work with over time. If you want the best customers, you have to treat your customers the best in your industry sector minimum.. In order to maximize the lifetime value of a customer, you have to be proactive to attract repeat business. This means you need to explore the ways to improve and future proof your customer experiences. While better leverage of websites, mobile / social channels, CRM systems and self service tasks will always be additive, but these efforts will not future proof your customer experience like the efforts below.

Improving Customer Journeys with Mapping:

There is a big disconnect between what customers want and what organizations provide at key touch points in a customer's journey. Customers want to have organizations know them, what they want and adjust to their special needs. What customers get instead is the challenge of navigating organizational silos, dealing with standard transaction focused systems and the privilege of repeating the history to a customer service representative that has no freedom to handle exceptions. Worst of all customers have to answer rigid surveys that really do not allow for intimate feedback. Journey mapping is a great way to explore alternative approaches that can be implemented in a phased way.

Anticipating and Personalizing with Analytics:

Leveraging analytics that look at past journeys / cases and learn from them is a great first step, however that is not predictive, but reactive. While it is better than doing nothing, steps should be taken to predict what customers will want and how they will behave. Also exceptions can be anticipated categorized and predicted in terms of arrival rates and potential responses. Better customer partitioning combined with predictive analytics will allow for more precise personalization. Being able to predict and personalize in real time combined with more flexible processes and applications, will win customers hearts.Leveraging New Senses with Intelligence:

Utilizing voice and vision will be key in the coming years. Chatbots are helpful, but intelligent / AI driven digital assistants that leverage location and smart devices will help customers be more effective in helping themselves. Voice recognition, natural language and AI will be used powerfully together to improve the lives of customers in the most customer centric organizations. Image recognition, immersive reality and AI will also be used proactively minded organizations.

Net; Net:

While not all organizations will jump on the most advanced approaches mentioned above, all organizations will have to move from customer service as usual. Sitting still is no longer a viable long term option. A credible mobile presence is table stakes, but to get into the game customer journey mapping combined with new intelligent approaches will get organizations in the game of long lasting customer loyalty.